Facebook picks up travel recommenders Nextstop

Facebook has engineered its latest micro-acquisition, buying little-known travel recommendation start-up Nextstop in what it calls a “talent acquisition”.

“We’ve admired the engineering team’s efforts for some time now and we’re excited to have them join Facebook,” a company spokesman said. The spokesman did not say if Facebook had any other plans for the site.

The world’s No. 1 social networking site — with half a billion members and counting — has been making select purchases this past year. Most notably, the six-year-old firm founded by Mark Zuckerberg said in August it was picking up fast-rising social media startup Friendfeed — with an eye towards its ex-Google engineers.

Nextstop.com shuts down on Sept. 1 — just about a year or so after its founding. Its home page now displays a message saying, “What this means is that we’ll be joining Facebook and that Facebook has bought most of our assets.”

Nextstop was launched in early 2009 by former Googlers Carl Sjogreen and Adrian Graham, according to the technology blog TechCrunch. The site is focused on making travel recommendations a social activity.

“This creates a number of big changes for the nextstop product and our community, but we believe it’s an opportunity for some of the ideas behind nextstop to reach Facebook’s audience of more than 400 million users and have a much bigger impact on the world than we could on our own,” Nextstop said on its homepage.